Quarantine

Quarantine. 

A strict isolation to prevent the spread of disease.

A father leans his forehead against the cool glass of the hospital observation window.  Inside his 5 year old son sweats in a chilly room all alone.  Wrestling in the sheets with tubes coming out of him he shrieks against the persistent beeping and calls weakly for his father.  Nurses come in and out of the room,  but are of little comfort dressed as they are in protective white suits and masks.  The father would do anything to be with his son, giving his very life for a moment of comfort for the boy.  But he knows he can’t.  If anyone is exposed to what the boy is carrying they will in fact die.  So the father waits.

Is there any doubt as to the viral nature of human behavior?  For the Christian, this seemingly unstoppable force of infectious brokenness is Sin.  Both in nature and in culture, it is pervasive.  Sin is passed from parent to child in both heredity and by contact.  It is unavoidable and we live with it.  Like cancer ravaging a healthy body, Sin is the corruption of something good, the perversion of purpose.  We know we are sinful from the Creation story, but we also know it because of experiential evidence.  We see it in our neighbors, and if we are honest we know it about our own hearts.

Adam and Eve chose something other than God and therefore Sin entered God’s creation by the mere act of failing to trust Goodness.  With a flaming sword, God lovingly set us aside, out of the Garden, out of perfection.  Without understanding the nature of a perfect and holy God it is hard to see this act as loving.  But though he loved Adam and Eve, they became an affront to his goodness and holiness.  Though he loves us, we must remain just out of reach.  Our sickness could not and cannot be tolerated by his perfection, he would cease to be perfect if our sin was to be ignored.  However, instead of destroying us, he set us aside.  God is the standard, every thing else is a reaction to that standard.  Eden and Heaven are the ultimate reality, the quarantine of our earthly existence is a distortion of this.  We are judged by heaven’s standards.  Confusion comes when we try to judge heaven and God by our standards, which is ridiculous when you think about it.

In this quarantine, the story becomes God’s pursuit of his people and his desire to protect the remnant of his chosen people. What is the Law of Moses but a protection from the very thing that infects us.  The Law points to both the survival in this quarantine and the perfection of God.  The Law is not about who we are, but who God is.  It cannot be met, but remains necessary of we are to survive in this world plagued by sin.  The story of God and indeed the story of the Bible from Genesis 3 on is his pursuit of his people: shaping, molding, culling, revealing, directing and loving.  A good and gracious God desperate for his creation to be redeemed that they might be with him again.  He sees our pain from beyond, not able to absolve but still merciful.  The plan is in motion and has always been in motion.  We will be his people and he will be our God.  Through the shaping of his people, the antidote is produced.  Jesus Christ is God himself strapping on flesh and all its failings to deliver salvation into the quarantine itself.  He chose to be with the hurting in his time here: the sickest in spirit and in flesh, the poor and the destitute.  The weakest are the ones he ached for the most.  It is Christ’s Love that changed the world, for in that short time God’s eternal love for his creation was on full display.

Sin is passed by blood.  Blood reaches every cell of the body and every organ.  Christ is the perfect specimen, introduced into the quarantine to create a chain reaction with his blood.  With his blood he brings the cure and with his resurrection that blood is released in and by the Spirit.  Salvation has been exposed to the world and it is the job of the Church, the body of believers to deliver this blood and flesh to the world and throughout history.  The Word is God and the Word became flesh and now we the Church deliver the flesh of Christ through the Word and through communion, proclaiming his death and resurrection.  By the blood we are healed and in his death we may enter back into Eden and walk with our Father again in the cool of the day.  

There is no denying that some have a greater burden to bare.  Some nations, some tribes, some families, some individuals suffer beyond human comprehension.  This is the reality of living in quarantine.  For some this makes the possibility of a Loving God impossible.  The world is too atrocious and it assaults their inherent sense of fairness. "Injustice would not prevail if there were a just God."  Where does this sense of fairness and justice come from?  How do we know that things aren’t right?  It is the very revelation of a loving God that proclaims this injustice to us.  It is because we have a God that we even know that things aren’t right.  Believer or not, we are right to yearn for something better, to hope in something good.  We were made for something more and inherently we all know it.  Our failures begin when we search in the wrong place for our hope, much like Adam and Eve.   C.S. Lewis says it like this “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”  If there were no God our present situation wouldn’t be better, it would be hopeless and we would be in despair.  Our quarantine would become a wasteland, with no hope for life.   

There is something to hope for; it is the renewal of this world by the blood of Christ.  For our Eternal God this redemption is one motion, one big bang in which we were conceived in love to be in eternal community with our Father.  Until we can see it and are beyond the chains of time, we must endeavor to Love our God by Faith, accept the work of Christ through no effort of our own, and because of our acceptance realize that we must Love all the people of this world and make every effort to make things better and to spread the Good News.  Just as Christ prepares a place for us, so must we prepare for his return.  Though we are sick, there is work to do.  And though we are infected, Jesus is planning to accept us out of this reverse quarantine and (back) into paradise.